Review

The greatest white blues singer of her time, Janis Joplin is without rival in plumbing the bottomless depths of loss. Indeed, her spine-tingling wails and moans are a kind of rapture of the deep - no lyric about abandonment is too slight to warrant her bloodcurdling investment in it.

That intensity is everywhere evident on Pearl, the album on which the twenty-seven-year-old singer was working at the time of her death, in 1970, from a heroin overdose. Her new band, Full Tilt Boogie, cranks the volume when necessary ("Move Over") but… Read More

never competes with or overwhelms her, as her previous combos, Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Kozmic Blues Band, sometimes did.

Consequently, Joplin is fully able to go for emotional broke. Her version of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham's soul ballad "A Woman Left Lonely" is a harrowing journey along Desolation Row, while the strangled howl with which she opens Bert Berns and Jerry Ragovoy's "Cry Baby" sends a chilling signal of the ravages to come. "Get It While You Can," the devastating track that closes the album, crackles with desperation. It is a scarred survivor's advice to her sex: Love and pleasure must be seized whenever they offer themselves, though they are mere preludes to the pain that will surely follow.

Of course, Joplin was not a survivor, and that lends Pearl (her nickname for herself, chosen to match a female lover's tag of Ruby) a poignancy that is as undeniable now as it was upon its posthumous release, in 1971. Her humor on the self-mocking a cappella prayer "Mercedes Benz" (which was recorded in one take) includes this knowing barfly's request: "Prove that you love me/And buy the next round." And her lovely rendition of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" is her greatest studio recording - its eloquent restraint all the more effective in communicating the song's heartbreak.

Kristofferson, who had been Joplin's lover not long before her death, cried when he heard her version of the song. "Did we do this?" he reportedly asked as he stood before her dead body. It's the question that caring survivors are always left with, and one that Pearl, in its frightening beauty, does little to resolve. (RS 822)